Agile Management - Agile Doctor

9 June, 201627 June, 2016

The Five Attributes of a Good Scrum Team

One of the best experiences I can have as an Agile Coach is presenting Agile and Scrum to people with little or no experience. It grounds me and after many years of living Agile, keeps me from falling into the Curse of Knowledge cognitive bias. Between these presentations and my daily coaching practice, I am reminded yet again at the importance of forming a good scrum team. This, along with proper backlog compilation and maintenance, can make the difference between success and endless frustration. In my experience, proper scrum team formation is the area where companies who are unsuccessful in Agile transformations fail most often.

Over the years, with the help of my teams and the many knowledgeable colleagues that I have worked with, I have distilled everything I have learned and come up with five attributes of a good scrum team. I use it much like a mantra. Those attributes are: Small, Co-Located, Dedicated, Stable and Cross-Functional. That is not to say that a good scrum team will not have other elements or that you can’t witness improvement without all five, but like the sculptor who is only done when there is nothing left to take away, these five represent an ideal essence of a good team. None of these five things can be removed without real consequences to the success of the team.

Small

I write about size at length (and mention the five attributes) in a previous post, When it Comes to Software Development – Size Matters, so I encourage you to read it for some eye-opening account of a major study that confirms this fact. Suffice it to say that Software Development is about communication and collaboration. It is complex knowledge work. In a physical, manufacturing model, adding a person to the effort would result in the expected proportional increase in productivity. In software development, however, adding an additional person merely exponentially increases the number of communication channels whereby any expected increase in productivity is quickly overtaken by the number of communication channels created. There is a reason Agilists recommend small teams. Basically, you can save money because your cost per unit of productive (and quality) work decreases.

Co-Located

Co-Location seems to be an issue with all of the companies that I consult for. We know that the best software developers can be 10 times or more productive than the least. We know that face-to-face communication is multiple times better than any of the substitutes we employ when that mode is not available. We all laugh at the You Tube video “A Conference Call in Real Life”. We know that the unacknowledged creation of technical debt will cause us financial havoc for years to come. Not convinced, I encourage you to check out my blog on the High Cost of Low Cost Software Development. And yet we still continue to source our software development to low bidders around the globe. Here’s the really interesting thing. For many years I have asked a simple question – does it work? I get two answers. The majority shake their head, laugh, and provide a solid “No”. The optimists of the group say that “We have found a way to make it work.” I also see a great deal of blogs that are titled “How We Found a Way to Make Offshore Work”, but it takes little research skills to uncover the author as someone employed by a company that works offshore. Never is there an enthusiastic “Yes.” Most would bring the work back if they could, but it appears that there is a mysterious formation in many software development organizations that continues to think they are doing the right thing by piece-mealing work to various locations. I can only guess it is accounting, but I have yet to meet anyone whom I respect who actually understands software development who would recommend it.

Dedicated

I often rail against the project-centric focus of many software development organizations. For more information, I encourage you to check out my blog “Why Project Focused Mentality is Killing Software Development”. The problem is that in projects we build teams around projects so that one, especially a key employee, will be spread over multiple concurrent projects. There are a number of very serious negative effects to doing this. First, context shifting means that every time a developer must change their concentrated area of focus they will lose 15 minutes minimum. If I am working on two different projects concurrently, there is not a huge loss, assuming that I might work on one in the morning and one after lunch, but many developers are bounced from thing to thing like so many pinballs with context shifting throughout the day. Hours each day are wasted and no project gets the attention it deserves. A better way is to create a small, co-located scrum team around a product backlog and bring the work of these multiple projects to the team via their backlog. The ability for individuals on the team to not fall prey to context shifting will allow them to focus on their work, even at times leading to a state called Flow in which developers (and athletes, artists, etc) are at their peak performance. For those interested, I refer you to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Stable

Project-centric thinking also results in teams that are short-lived. We put the team together for a particular period (sometimes relatively short) of time. When the project is done, the team is disbanded. This causes a number of issues. First, every team goes through a period of “storming, norming, and performing.” This is easy to see visually when you plot the velocities of multiple teams on a timeline. You can visually see the storming period as teams learn to work together as a team instead of a collection of individuals, through very low (if non-existent) velocity. In my experience, I have come to the conclusion that I expect nearly nothing from a brand new team for the first couple of iterations. It is not until they reach iterations 3, 4 or even 5 that they will reach what is their performing velocity. Therefore, every time I break up a team, I have a very high overhead associated with the team’s “storming and norming.” Another benefit of keeping the same people on teams for a longer period of time is by simply learning how to better communicate with each other over time. Since software development is about communication and collaboration, the more time we spend together, the more effective we become in communicating. I remember reading about the notion of “hyper-productive” teams from Scott Downey and Jeff Sutherland. The interesting thing is that their “hyper-performance” did not manifest until after the team had been together for some time.

Cross Functional

In some respects, cross functionality of people is a by-product of the fact that team size should be kept small. If there are 15 things I need to do to get my code into production, I obviously will not be able to do so if there needs to be an expert for each piece. The creation of “silos” is great if your goal is to create a MDD (mortgage driven development) environment. It is bad for the flow of the product. Silos create queues. Queues, if you want to deliver something quicker, are bad. I highly recommend the book Principles of Product Development Flow by Don Reinersten for a deeper understanding of queuing theory and the damage that out-of-control queues can have. This book talks about the concept of generalizing specialists. In my experience, developers are more motivated by status and mastery of new technology and ideas than any other group of people I have worked with. Creating an environment where developers are expected to know more than a single specialized domain is not only good for moving the software through the system quicker, but it also leads to greater developer engagement. A team should be responsible for all aspects of the software product and the development cycle. This cannot be accomplished without having team members who are cross functional.

Final Thoughts

An old African proverb states, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” In order to be successful in software development we need to understand teams and team dynamics. My many years of experience working with what I would estimate around a hundred development teams has led me to conclude that there are five basic attributes for an optimal development team – small, co-located, dedicated, stable and cross functional. I hope that these five attributes help you as you continue your quest for agility.

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9 February, 201618 February, 2016

Hit Rock Bottom? Maybe Now You’re Ready for Agile

One of the things I enjoy most about my work is meeting other Agile practitioners and coaches and sharing war stories. Recently I was at an Agile Coffee with people who had various experience with Agile, ranging from complete neophytes to folks with many years of experience. The topic chosen was “What are the preconditions for a large company to be successful implementing Agile?” – a very pointed, yet valid, question to be sure. All of the answers were ones that one might expect; support from upper management, learning culture, etc. except for one. The lone unobvious answer was provided by someone whose opinion I respect. I was somewhat surprised at the time and it has reverberated in my mind ever since, “one precondition for a company to be successful in an Agile transformation is they have failed miserably and have hit rock bottom.”

The term “rock bottom” is most commonly used by folks in NA and AA (Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous). I found the following definition of rock bottom on a website for alcohol addiction:

… often used to describe a point … when they are finally willing to seek help. Things are now so bad for them that it is impossible to deny their problem anymore. Hitting rock bottom may result due to a particular event, or it can be a slow decline over time. This is a subjective term because some … will be willing to suffer a lot more … than others.

I first came in contact with Anonymous groups through my work in healthcare (nearly a lifetime ago when I was a licensed Health Care Administrator) and have more than one commented on how Agile transformations remind me of some of the twelve steps – with the first step being to admit one has a problem.

So when my friend mentioned that a good indicator for agile transformation success was a company had hit rock bottom I knew exactly what he was referring to. In this particular case he used the examples of the FBI Sentinel Project and Healthcare.gov website debacle. In both cases, it wasn’t until each was a total disaster that Agile was actually tried with any seriousness and rigor and in both cases the results were amazing.

The total spend of these [two] failed [Waterfall] attempts to replace the ACS system was $597m and wasted 10 years. The Agile project, which is now delivering a solution, will only cost $114m for a three-year long project.

In another recent talk I went to on Agile a gentleman explained how Agile helped with an ad agency. He was only brought in AFTER the agency blew millions on a website that never made it to production. After losing millions I would guess this agency hit “rock bottom”. The good news was that Agile was able to help them to change and allowed them to produce high quality software with a much better time to market (than never).

In my agile coaching practice I have had more than one conversation with enlightened management that has acknowledged our Agile transformation wasn’t working as good as hoped and, barring a complete meltdown, most folks were happy to continue along a non-optimal path. In fact, relative success is a particularly sticky barrier to change as people often confuse the ability to get something done with the ability to get something done optimally. Bill Gates has often remarked, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” Sometimes what we mistakenly call “failure” is a much better teacher. Sometimes the lesson is more important than the perception of relative success or failure.

Just this morning I was listening to my local NPR station as they were having a fund drive. Like many others, I couldn’t wait for the drive to be over so I could no longer had to feel the shame and guilt of being a “free rider”. Fortunately, it was the last day of the pledge drive and my mind was only half listening to the chatter of the announcers when they introduced Shankar Vedantam who does segments on the Hidden Brain (which I enjoy immensely). His topic was why people donate (or don’t donate) to pledge drives. He talked about humans’ tendency to pay more attention to emergencies and crisis than what is important. Being the last day of the pledge he hoped what was merely important (donating) would now also be given the status of an emergency because time was running out.

My mind went immediately back to the concept of “rock bottom” and why this is one good indicator of where Agile can be successful. Sometimes it is only when we hit rock bottom that the importance of being Agile begins to align with the immediate crisis of having to be Agile. It is then, and unfortunately for some, only then when Agile gets the attention and focus it deserves. It is my hope companies realize becoming an Agile organization is essential to their long term survival (at least in organizations that rely heavily on software development), seek the help they need to transition and actually carry out the transition before they hit rock bottom. In the meantime, if you have hit rock bottom (are you listening Yahoo!?), please seek out Agile help.

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4 January, 20167 January, 2016

The Most Important (and Least Understood) Software Development Fact

Facts and Fallacies of Software Development Book

I love the holidays – the family, friends, food, drink, and, of course, the gift cards. I love to read and time off plus Amazon Gift Cards means the opportunity to indulge my passion. As the New Year begins, I find myself knee deep in two wonderful books about software development and the workplace. One of these, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass, I found fascinating even though it was published over ten years ago. While some of the material is dated, I found that most of the facts and fallacies are as valid today as they would have been decades ago. This alone is disconcerting. You would have expected that, by now, most of these facts and fallacies would be well understood and to some extent corrected. If anything, my experience is that there is less understanding of the true nature of software development now than ever. It should be required reading for anyone in the business of managing software development because it would certainly save many a great deal of frustration by learning vicariously from one of luminaries of software development.

It was just about midway into the 55 facts (Fact 21 in fact), that I stumbled onto what could easily be construed as the most important (and least understood) software development fact in Glass’ book. The fact is titled “Complexity” and states:

For every 25 percent increase in problem complexity, there is a 100 percent increase in complexity of the software solution. That’s not a condition to try to change (even though reducing complexity is always a desirable thing t0 do); that’s just the way it is.

Glass, Robert L.; Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

Glass goes on to state, “If you remember nothing else from reading this book, remember this.” He closes his statement of fact with “And remember, also, that there are no silver bullets for overcoming this problem. Software solutions are complex because that’s the nature of this particular beast.“

What struck me most about this particular fact and Glass’ treatment of it is how closely it aligns with my experience and things I have written and spoken about in the past. Software development is knowledge work and is generally complex, but a majority of people in software development are unaware of this fact and continue to treat software development as if it were physical (mechanistic) work and either simplistic or merely complicated.

It is by understanding this fact that software development will improve. Why? The things that we employ to combat the Complex are much different than the things that work against the Complicated. The Agile movement was a response against using complicated tactics in the complex world. The Agile philosophy engendered a whole host of frameworks, methodologies and development techniques all of which address the need to address complexity. Why do large teams not work so well in software development? Why does scrum talk about small teams? Because small teams are better at attacking complexity. Large teams are adequate for attacking the complicated. The same holds true about co-location, dedication, stability, and cross-functionality. These are all things that work well for complexity.

If we want to create better software we would be well to head Glass’ fact. We need to stop treating software development like we are building a house or assembling a car. Software is much too complex to be built using the tired old mechanistic means. Remember that as complexity of the problem increases, the complexity of the solution increases at a much higher rate, along with the risks attendant on increased complexity. If you want to mitigate your risk, it is essential that you learn how to properly deal with complexity. You might want to learn how to become Agile.

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30 December, 201531 December, 2015

Wagerfall

The end of the year is upon us and, like most, I have begun to reflect on the year that was 2015. It was a great year for me both personally and professionally. Earlier this year I was given the opportunity of a lifetime to help build an Agile practice and continue my work as an Agile coach. As I looked back on 2015 I could not help but notice the really big news in the world of Agile was the concept of scaling. There has been a proliferation of scaling frameworks. Time will tell which, if any, will be beneficial, but it did get me to wondering if maybe there wasn’t room for just one more.

What follows is a satirical press release for the newest of Agile scaling frameworks. My purpose was not to offend or disparage, but to amuse. My apologies if I missed the mark. I wish you all a happy and prosperous new year!

“Wagerfall” – A New Way to Scale Agile

Agile Scaling Society announced today a new framework for scaling Agile called “Wagerfall”. This new lightweight framework trumps all others in an increasingly crowded field for the ease of its implementation.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK (PR FILE) DECEMBER 30, 2015

You might be familiar with Agile scaling frameworks like SAFe, DAD, LeSS and the like and today a new scaling framework has joined the list, Wagerfall. Wagerfall is the brainchild of Steven Anderson of the Agile Scaling Society. According to Anderson, Wagerfall is different in that it represents the easiest of all the scaling frameworks.

“The beauty of Wagerfall is in its simplicity. The framework is nothing more than the name Wagerfall because the name explains it all. You start with your current waterfall and sprinkle in a little agile somewhere in the middle. The “g” in the middle is for represents the Agile part,” asserts Anderson. When asked why not the “ag” for agile, Anderson mumbled something about it not being mandatory and holy wars.

The announcement today also coincided with another press release detailing Wagerfall certification. In the spirit of lean and reduction of waste, the Agile Scaling Society has done away with any mandatory training or testing to get certification. “Why go to the trouble of pulling someone out of their job for two days?,” asks Anderson. “Send us your money and we will send you a lovely (and very fancy) certificate you can hang on your wall and you too can say that you are Wagerfall certified. Doesn’t it make sense if your company is not going to change anyway?” When asked why certification cost so much, Anderson replied, “science has taught us the more money we invest in something, the more value we place on it.”

There are already a great number of clients joining the ranks of Wagerfall. Donald Love, CIO of Great Big Company, credits Anderson and Wagerfall for their successful Agile transformation. “I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to work with Wagerfall. We transitioned to Agile immediately without the messy process of organization change, with all the training and thinking that comes with it. I can now check this one off my list and get my big fat bonus.”

It is not just the C-suite that has fallen in love with Wagerfall; the frontline workers have embraced it as well. Vijay Patel, a software developer, credits Wagerfall with allowing him to go about his business as he always done. “We’ve tried other Agile transitions, and I believed in them. I put myself out there and honestly tried to change. When the truth surfaced and us developers found out it was just lip service, we were crushed. Our morale is still low under Wagerfall, but we know Wagerfall is just lip service, so we got that going for us.”

In addition to the framework and the certifications, Anderson has a cadre of Wagerfall coaches. Anderson states, “The problem with most Agile coaches is that they are either not competent or too earnest. Wagerfall deals with these two problems head on. Since there is no recognizable change, competency is not an issue. Furthermore, our coaches provide a patina of credibility without pestering people to change their existing behavior. We often refer to what we do as ‘homeopathic agile.’”

While other scaling frameworks have detailed flowcharts, organizational structure documents, etc., Wagerfall avoids such complexities. Mindy Minter, Head Architect at Great Big Company, praises Wagerfall for its simplicity. “We are big believers in the KISS principle. You can’t get more KISS than Wagerfall. Pay your fee. Get your certification. Claim you’re Agile.”

According to Anderson, perhaps the most valuable aspect of Wagerfall is in the ability to roll back should the transition not work out as planned. “Just imagine, run a global search and replace on all your process documentation. Voilà. Wagerfall is turned back to Waterfall and you can go about your business as if nothing ever changed.”

About Agile Scaling Society

The Agile Scaling Society, headquartered in New York (to give it legitimacy), was founded on the belief that most companies want to be Agile without the hard work of actually changing their culture, philosophy or business processes. They provide certifications, training and coaching to allow companies to claim to be Agile while operating exactly as they always have. They claim that literally hundreds of major companies are currently following the Wagerfall framework and are in litigation with many of them for infringing on their trademarked Wagerfall process.

About Steven Anderson

Steven Anderson has been described as a “jack of all trades” with experience in selling homeopathic medicine, street preaching and HVAC. While new to Agile, he recognized the opportunity to make money and has embraced it. He once owned a PC and wrote some excel macros. He has parlayed this experience into a successful consulting company and has recently founded the Agile Scaling Society.

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1 December, 20159 December, 2015

Agile – It’s All About Making Better Decisions

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently doing research, reading and presenting on human cognitive biases. To the initiated, cognitive biases are defined as

“…a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion. Individuals create their own ‘subjective social reality’ from their perception of the input.” (Wikipedia Definition)

In other words, cognitive biases exist when there is a gap between our perception of reality and objective reality. For example, there is the “confirmation bias” which is our human tendency to seek out or interpret information that confirms one’s existing opinions.

While the term “cognitive bias” is relatively new (it was coined in 1972 by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman), researchers have already uncovered literally over a hundred cognitive biases, some which are relatively tame like the “google effect” (or digital amnesia), where there is a tendency to forget information that can be easily researched, to ones that can lead to more disastrous consequences like the Sunk Cost Fallacy where people justify increased investment in a decision based on prior investment instead of looking only at future efficacy. The Sunk Cost Effect, along with the Overconfidence Effect and Receny Effect, played a role in the May 1996 mountain climbing tragedy, made famous in the movie Everest, that resulted in the death of five experienced climbers.

A great number of cognitive biases have been found through the work of behavioral economics researchers like Dan Ariely who wrote the wonderful books Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality. Underlying all of classic economics is the concept of homo economicus, or economic man who behaves in rational ways to maximize individual returns and acts in his own self-interest. Unfortunately, this is not the case and humans often act irrationally (and predictably so) because of their inherent cognitive biases. Humans all have biases for loss aversion and would choose to avoid loss over a larger corresponding potential gain and thus act as “homo irrationalis” as discovered by behavioral economics instead of “homo economicus” as predicted by classic economics.

It is our cognitive biases that cause us to make irrational decisions. Since behavioral economists found many of these cognitive biases, it was not a great leap to see how cognitive biases would be a paramount concern for the economics of software development. In my coaching practice, a great deal of my time and effort is used in helping organizations make better decisions about software development. Many times the optimal decisions are counter intuitive to people’s inherent biases so my job (and my passion) is helping companies see the world of software development differently so that, when it comes down to making a decision, they have all the knowledge necessary to make the optimal economic decision.

One of the most prevalent biases in software development is to see the world in a mechanistic / Tayloristic manner. Taylor’s viewpoint was fine for the old world of physical work, but does not hold up in the complex knowledge work being done by software development professionals today. Unfortunately, most of the people making software development decisions are predominantly influenced by this old, less optimal way of viewing the world, and, as a result, make sub-optimal decisions. For example, in the mechanistic worldview, adding more people to an effort results in a corresponding increase in output. If there is an existing team of seven people and we add seven more then we would (if we hold this mechanistic bias) expect the work to be approximately twice as fast. However, like the behavioral economists that found the real world to be counter intuitive to homo economicus, actual studies have found that the need for increased communication of knowledge work nearly outpaces any incremental increase in individual productivity (see Top Performing Projects Use Small Teams). I have always said that if you want to double productivity of a fourteen person team all that is necessary is to create two teams of seven.

The mechanistic bias can also be seen in many of the ways that the Agile philosophy is implemented. For example, the scrum framework is often trained as a series of ceremonies and actions with little or no understanding of the reason such mechanistic actions are successful. “Scrum Masters” are “certified” with only two days of training and a simple test. The training deals with ideal situations, but when the scrum master actually has to implement scrum, he or she is woefully unprepared. In the real world compromises and decisions must be made. Without understanding the underlying “why” of agile and the basic nature of software development, the decisions and compromises that are made are not optimal. In my experience, this is why project managers are tougher to train than people with no project management experience. When faced with ambiguous information and the need to make optimal decisions, project managers tend to fall back on existing mechanistic knowledge and the decisions made range from mildly irritating to completely disastrous. As I have often pointed out, to say that one was successful with waterfall reeks of confirmation bias because it begs the question of whether or not one would have been more successful using another methodology or framework like Lean or Scrum.

In addition to the mechanistic bias, software development suffers from another bias, the project-centric bias, which is the tendency to see all work done in terms of projects. Unfortunately, the project-centric bias is so ingrained in companies that there needs to be some radical changes to the way we view software development across all areas, including accounting. Viewing work as a project when we are actually working on software products results in a whole raft of poor software economic decisions like concentrating on features more than quality and security. Remember that no one washes a rental car.

As I think back on my coaching work in agile, the blogs I have written, the many discussions I have had and the presentations I have made, I think that all of these boil down into one very simple thing – my work is all about helping people understand the true nature of the software development business process and, thereby helping them to make better decisions. Understanding our cognitive biases, therefore, is extremely important for my clients and myself because, in the end, Agile is all about making better decisions.

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23 November, 201517 December, 2015

Five Impactful Interview Questions for Prospective Scrum Masters

A friend of mine who happens to read my blogs contacted me the other day with a question – could you write a blog about “the five most important questions to ask a scrum master in an interview?” It seems that his company had interviewed a bunch of scrum masters and was not able to find a fit. In his words, “a lot of people think they want to be scrum masters but have only taken the one week training and don’t really get how to truly be successful in an enterprise workforce.” Having run into the same issue many times, I hope that I can provide some direction to help my friend and others faced with the same situation.

In the past, I have written about the problem of scrum certifications, specifically the Certified Scrum Master (CSM) certification. The issue is that people hiring scrum masters have mistakenly believed that a certification means more than it really does. Prior to interviewing a scrum master candidate it is essential to know that the CSM can be obtained by anyone who can sit still for two days and take an easy test. I am not sure how many people have failed the certification test but in over seven years of being intimately involved with Agile and Scrum I have never heard of a single one. If people cannot fail a test how good can the test be. Given this fact I am not even certain that a CSM should be part of the job description. A few months of “boots on the ground” scrum is better than the two-day training.

I have also written in the past about my favorite question to ask prospective scrum masters, namely,

“What book have you read recently that has changed the way you think about Agile and the way you go about your job as a scrum master (or coach) and why?”.

This question would certainly be on the list of five because it shows the desire of the candidates to better themselves outside of the normal workday. Agile and scrum are brief in words but very complex in practice. It is difficult to be a true “master” without looking past the Manifesto and two day training to what the experts are writing about. Bonus points to someone who replies with a book not written specifically about Agile or Scrum and having the ability to apply something from another discipline to their practice.

A big challenge in being a scrum master is understanding what makes for a good team. In my practice I have boiled it down to five aspects of a successful team. A good question would be to ask them

“what would you consider to be the five traits of a good Agile scrum team and why are these traits important?”

An experienced scrum master knows more than just theory. While a certification course can show us the happy path of scrum, the real world application is a lot messier. Like I don’t recall anyone ever failing the certification test, I don’t recall any seasoned scrum master not having to make adjustments or compromises when applying scrum. Of course these things are not optimal, but sometimes trade offs must be made in the short run in order to make things successful in the long run. The next question I would ask,

“Give me an example of when you have had to compromise or make a trade off in a Agile scrum implementation and why?”

A scrum master’s primary responsibility, in addition to the facilitation of scrum ceremonies, is to assist the team in removing impediments. A scrum master with experience should have multiple examples of how they were able to play the role of servant leader and remove impediments so my next question would be

“in your past please provide an example of a time when you successfully removed an impediment (or impediments) and what was the result?”

Most inexperienced scrum masters are able to speak to the scrum framework and the scrum ceremonies, but have not yet gained enough of an understanding of why Agile and scrum works. My last question (assuming I only have five) would be

“please explain why, when properly implemented, Agile and scrum are successful ways to create high quality software?”

I believe the questions above should aid anyone in assessing the true ability of a scrum master. I am also certain that there are many folks out there who might have similar or better questions that have been successful in the past. Please feel free to comment. In the spirit of open collaboration and helping others, like my friend, hire appropriately, what questions do you ask that have been effective

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